Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/203

 silver or copper, that it is cast into fetiches (small grotesque figures). "These fetiches are cut into small bits by the negroes of one, two, or three farthings. The negroes know the exact value of these bits so well at sight, that they never are mistaken, and accordingly they sell them to each other without weighing as we do coined money ." This recalls the practice as regards silver among the Tibetans at the present day.

Crossing to the eastern side of Africa we find the natives of Madagascar employing a system, the basis of which is a grain of rice. "The Malagasy have no circulating medium of their own. Dollars are known more or less throughout the island: but in many of the provinces trade is carried on principally by an exchange of commodities. The Spanish dollar, stamped with the two pillars, bears the highest value. For sums below a dollar the inconvenient method is resorted to in the interior, of weighing the money in every case. Dollars are cut up into small pieces, and four iron weights are used for the half, quarter, eighth, and twelfth of a dollar. Below that amount, divisions are effected by combinations of the four weights, and also by means of grains of rice, even down so low as one single grain—"Vary vray venty," one plump grain, valued at the seven hundred and twentieth part of a dollar . The grain of rice therefore weighs 5/9 gr. troy (·036 gram). As gold is not found in Madagascar the natives could not weigh it first of all things; but they have carried out the principle of taking silver, the most precious article they possessed, as the first object to be weighed.

In this chapter, therefore, we have sought the method by which weight standards are fixed among primitive and semi-*civilized peoples; we have studied the system or systems of China, Cochin-China, Cambodia, Laos and the great Islands of the Indian Ocean. Everywhere we have received the self-same answer, everywhere the lowest unit is nothing more than a natural seed or grain. We found in two places in the area